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Devils Hole Pupfish, Amargosa Valley, Nevada. Photo \u00a9 Stone Nature Photography\u00a0\/ Alamy<\/p>\n
According to Donald Trump, the LA fires can be blamed on \u2018an essentially worthless fish called a smelt\u2019, which lives in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California. On Truth Social, Trump accused California\u2019s governor, Gavin Newsom, of having \u2018refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the north, to flow daily into many parts of California.\u2019 <\/p>\n
This was not true. \u2018There is no such document as the water restoration declaration,\u2019 Newsom\u2019s office<\/a> responded. \u2018That is pure fiction.\u2019 Los Angeles takes most of its water not from the delta but from the Owens Valley (Payahuunad\u00fc, the \u2018land of flowing water\u2019), the Colorado River and from groundwater. <\/p>\n It is true, though, that Trump, in his first presidency, called for more water transfers in California, and Newsom blocked them. What was at stake was never water for Los Angeles, but for California\u2019s Central Valley, which produces up to 18 per cent of US agricultural output by value. It\u2019s industrialised, financialised agribusiness, fuelled by hydrological engineering at a vast scale: 8.6 km3<\/sup> of water is delivered through the canals of the Central Valley Project<\/a> each year, most of it coming from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. But two periods of drought between 2007 and 2016 meant farmers had to withdraw hundreds of thousands of acres from cultivation.<\/p>\n In February 2020, Trump spoke at a rally<\/a> in Bakersfield to announce billions of dollars to repair and extend water infrastructure in the Central Valley. \u2018All the farmland will be green and beautiful,\u2019 he told the crowd. So when Newsom announced he would file a lawsuit to stop the president\u2019s initiative in order to protect the \u2018highly imperilled\u2019 smelt and other delta fish, Trump wasn\u2019t best pleased.<\/p>\n The delta smelt<\/a> was at the time functionally extinct: since 2016, surveys in the estuary had failed to find a single fish (though captive breeding populations exist, and have since been released back into the delta). They are delicate creatures. According to Katherine Sun<\/a>, who works for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, they are \u2018relatively weak swimmers\u2019 and have to be transported in round containers because otherwise they \u2018get stuck in corners, they get stressed out, and they die\u2019. Their numbers started to decline in the mid-20th century as water in the delta became polluted by farm run-off, and billions of gallons were pumped out to supply farms and cities, changing the salinity. Invasive clams ate the smelt\u2019s lunch. The population collapsed and in 1993 the fish was listed as \u2018threatened\u2019 under the US Endangered Species Act<\/a> as well as California\u2019s own ESA<\/a>. In 2009, the state upgraded the delta smelt\u2019s status to \u2018endangered\u2019.<\/p>\n The federal ESA was enacted in 1973. A recent study<\/a> estimated that 291 species would have disappeared were it not for ESA protections, and 99 per cent of species listed on it have survived. One of its requirements is that that \u2018any action authorised, funded or carried out\u2019 by a federal agency \u2018is not likely to jeopardise the continued existence\u2019 of an endangered or threatened species, or \u2018destroy or adversely modify\u2019 the \u2018critical habitat\u2019 essential to its survival. Which is why Trump couldn\u2019t get his way. <\/p>\n Trump is not the only Republican to denigrate the delta smelt. In 2010, the California congressman Tom McClintock spoke out against \u2018the wilful destruction of 500,000 acres of American farmland by these massive water diversions, all for the enjoyment and amusement of the three-inch-long delta smelt\u2019. In 2011, Sarah Palin blamed the smelt\u2019s habitat protections for taking away the \u2018lifeline\u2019 of Central Valley farmers. \u2018Where I come from,\u2019 she said, \u2018a three-inch fish, we call that bait.\u2019 David Bernhardt worked as a lobbyist for the farmers until shortly before he joined the first Trump administration as secretary of the interior. Under his jurisdiction, the US Fish and Wildlife Service released a \u2018biological opinion\u2019 that pumping water from the delta would not harm the fish. Scientists were outraged, citrus growers<\/a> jubilant. Lawsuits followed.<\/p>\n In December I tried to see another endangered fish on the ESA list, the Devils Hole pupfish. These silvery iridescent creatures live in a single cave just 22 metres long and 3.5 metres wide, surrounded by the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge<\/a>, Nevada. The species has been completely isolated since the end of the last Ice Age, between ten and twenty thousand years ago, when the great lake that filled Death Valley receded, fragmenting pupfish populations into separate ecological niches. Devils Hole is thought to be \u2018the smallest habitat in the world containing the entire population of a vertebrate species\u2019, and its pupfish may be the most inbred species in the world: any two individuals are on average 58 per cent genetically identical.<\/p>\n People used to climb down into the cave and sit in the warm water, drinking beer, partying with the pupfish. But since 2013, when the pupfish population dropped to just 35 individuals, the entrance to the cave has been fenced off. There is a viewing tunnel of sorts, but from twenty metres away, in a dark pool, the inch-long fish are nowhere to be seen. <\/p>\n Ash Meadows, \u2018the Galapagos of the Mojave Desert\u2019, provides habitat for 26 plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Its wetlands are fed by fossil water more than ten thousand years old, which comes to the surface in over thirty seeps and springs. Yet in December 2024 it was bone dry. Winter is the rainy season in Southern California and the Mojave, but this winter the rains didn\u2019t come. Los Angeles had only 0.06 inches between July 2024 and early January, its second driest period in almost 150 years. This, unlike the delta smelt, contributed to the fires.<\/p>\n At Crystal Spring, a couple of miles from Devils Hole, the alkali meadows were dried to a crisp and invasive tamarisk trees sprawled grey-brown over the boardwalk. Yet the springs were beautiful, the water bright turquoise from dissolved minerals. And in a small, clear stream flowing through reeds, three Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish were swimming against the current. A sign on the boardwalk described them as \u2018playful\u2019; they\u2019re called pupfish because they reminded the ichthyologist Carl L. Hubbs of puppies.<\/p>\n In 1976 the US Supreme Court<\/a> established minimum water levels at Devils Hole to protect the fish. At first this was unpopular with local ranchers, as the water rules limited how much groundwater they could pump, but now that\u2019s changed. <\/p>\n A company named Rover Critical Minerals wants to test Ash Meadows\u2019 potential for lithium mining. But drilling for samples could contaminate the aquifer. Residents rely on groundwater wells for drinking water, and those wells are already coming up dry. For the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, the water sustains their sacred traditions. The laws defending the pupfish may offer the best chance of protecting people\u2019s water, too. On 14 January, the outgoing secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland, issued a \u2018mineral withdrawal<\/a>\u2019, suspending new mining activity across 309,000 acres of land around Ash Meadows Wildlife Refuge. It remains to be seen if Trump \u2013 and Elon Musk \u2013 will honour it.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in Nevada, endangered plant species such as Tiehm\u2019s buckwheat and Amargosa niterwort have been central to legal battles against lithium mines. Is a rare plant reason enough to prevent renewal energy development? Not only Republicans are sceptical. \u2018We\u2019ve got to meet the moment on climate change,\u2019 Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the interior under Biden, told the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>\u2018and public lands have to play a foundational role.\u2019 Seaver Wang<\/a> of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute argues that \u2018our perspective needs to be holistic. Blocking a project might prevent impacts on a species \u2026 but it may cause a slower energy transition + push projects elsewhere with higher impacts on communities + ecosystems.\u2019 Yet for many conservationists, every endangered species must be protected. As Patrick Donnelly<\/a> of the Center for Biodiversity puts it, \u2018the integrity of the Endangered Species Act is at stake.\u2019 If one species is allowed to \u2018go extinct for lithium\u2019, he says, \u2018it puts all endangered species at risk.\u2019<\/p>\n The Supreme Court<\/a> ruled in 1978 that the ESA explicitly forbade the completion of any infrastructure project that was likely to result in the elimination of a species: the Tellico Dam, a $53 million construction project on the Little Tennessee River, was put on hold to save another small fish, the snail darter \u2013 until Congress passed an exemption for the dam the following year. The darters were transplanted to other river systems and in 2022 removed from the endangered species list.<\/p>\n Last month, researchers at Yale announced that the snail darter is not a distinct species at all: it is genetically and physically identical to the stargazing darter, a fish plentiful in US waters. The species identification may have been driven by a desire to stop the dam, a temptation taxonomists recognise as the \u2018conservation species concept<\/a>\u2019. <\/p>\n We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems. Might emerging \u2018rights of nature\u2019 legal models allow for more holistic environmental protection by allowing natural entities such as rivers to have legal protections, even legal personhood? <\/p>\n In the US, at least, the question may now be moot. Among the barrage of executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office was a declaration of a \u2018national energy emergency\u2019. It calls for \u2018the integrity and expansion of our nation\u2019s energy infrastructure\u2019 and reanimates the rarely convened Endangered Species Committee, aka the \u2018god squad\u2019 of high-ranking federal officials able to grant ESA exemptions. On Sunday, 26 January, Trump signed a further executive order directing federal agencies to deliver more water through the Central Valley Project and \u2018override existing activities that unduly burden efforts to maximise water deliveries\u2019 \u2013 getting his revenge on the delta smelt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n